Staffing Agencies

A staffing agency's job is to find people and put them into roles at another company, either for a short assignment or as a permanent hire. That means sourcing candidates, screening and interviewing them, checking references, sometimes running background checks or skills tests, and handling the paperwork — offer letters, contracts, and in the case of temporary staff, payroll, tax withholding and workers' comp for someone who technically works for the agency but shows up at your site. When it works, a manager who needed three warehouse pickers or a finance director gets people showing up ready to start, without having spent weeks writing job ads, sifting resumes and running first-round interviews.

People end up looking for one of these because hiring on their own has stalled or become too risky to keep doing in-house. A production line is short-staffed and the gap is costing output today, not next quarter. An HR team is stretched thin and can't run a proper search for a specialist finance or IT role on top of everything else. A business has a seasonal spike — retail before the holidays, an agricultural harvest, a warehouse before a product launch — and needs bodies for eight weeks, not a permanent headcount increase. Or a company has been burned by a bad hire and wants someone else to own the vetting and, if it goes wrong, the liability of employment.

Agencies split mainly by how they get paid and what they specialise in. Temporary and temp-to-hire staffing puts people on the agency's payroll and bills you an hourly markup, which suits fluctuating demand and lets you try someone before committing. Direct hire and executive search work on a placement fee, usually a percentage of first-year salary, and suit permanent or senior roles where getting the wrong person is expensive. Beyond that, the real differences are depth versus breadth: some firms run broad general labour and administrative desks across many sectors, others specialise tightly in one — manufacturing, engineering, accounting, IT — and know the skills, licensing and pay benchmarks for that field specifically. Worth comparing: how fast they can actually fill a role, what their fall-off rate looks like (candidates who don't show or don't last), what guarantee period they offer on placements, whether they carry their own workers' comp and liability cover, and whether they operate locally with people who know your area's labour market or run a national desk that's faster but more generic.